The European AI Night is the first public event of the AI4EU project. The event takes place on Thursday, April 18, 2019 at the Palais de Tokyo in Paris. Funded by the European Commission, AI4EU, an acronym for “Artificial Intelligence for the European Union”, unites 79 partner organisations based in 21 countries. The AI Night welcomes participants from the local AI community, business leaders, researchers, developers and policymakers as well as project partners and a group of experts from the European Commission. With up to 2,000 attendees, participants can choose between several lectures, panel discussions and workshops featuring some of Europe’s most influential AI leaders.

The AI Night is an important step towards building a European AI community. It is also the starting point of a series of public AI events scheduled to take place across Europe. During the AI Night, participants can find out about innovative applications of AI in a wide range of research and business areas, such as education, robotics, mobility, healthcare, media, insurance, finance, Internet of Things and cyber security. The event, organised by France Digitale and Artefact, brings together AI experts and solution providers with business and industry leaders who need to get their enterprises ready for the digital transformation. The lectures and panel discussions provide an overview of the status of AI and Big Data research and application in Europe. An AI exhibition will highlight innovative solutions. Workshops address specific topics and target audiences, such as AI solutions for small and medium-sized enterprises, AI applications in human resources and research on human-centred AI. In the workshops, participants will get the chance to interact and provide valuable input into the design, functionality and technical implementation of the AI4EU platform.

The AI4EU platform is an open AI-on-demand platform, aiming to counterbalance the fragmentation of AI knowledge and experience in Europe. Launching this summer, the platform will be open to the European AI community comprising researchers, technology developers, experts in business and industry as well as educators and the general public. For these groups, the platform offers access to curated data suitable for testing and developing AI applications, certified AI tools and algorithms as well as computing power.

The AI4EU project receives a total funding of €20 million from the European Commission over the next three years. As part of the Horizon 2020 programme, AI4EU forms a key element in the EU strategy on Artificial Intelligence, aiming to increase public and private investment in AI technologies, facilitating access to data and tools, as well as educating and training future experts and employees from all business sectors, especially small and medium-sized enterprises in Europe. Furthermore, an ‚Ethics Observatory’ will be established in order to engage AI experts and the European public in discussions about ethical, legal and social implications of the technology.

The research conducted under the AI4EU umbrella focusses on human-centred AI. Human values and ethics will serve as guidelines for all research and development. The researchers will collaborate to identify and bridge knowledge gaps, provide collaborative AI tools and develop applications, which are explainable, verifiable and integrative. Moreover, the connection of the research and development activities to applications in the physical world, e.g. in industrial production, plays a major role. For this reason, the research will relate to eight pilot applications, e.g. in the fields of education, robotics, healthcare, media, agriculture, Internet of Things and cybersecurity.

The AI4EU project aims to reinforce European excellence and a worldwide leading position in key AI research and application domains. AI4EU is setting the roadmap for AI research, technological innovation and ethical governance for the next decades in Europe. Thus, the AI Night’s attendees, speakers, discussion panel members and workshop participants will become the pioneers who pave the way to advance AI in Europe and shape the future European AI landscape.

About Fraunhofer IAIS

The Fraunhofer Institute for Intelligent Analysis and Information Systems IAIS is one of Europe’s leading scientific institutes specialising in applied research into Big Data, Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence. The institute is one of the key partners in AI4EU and involved in technical direction, platform implementation, research and communication for the AI4EU project. Dr. Joachim Köhler, Head of Department at Fraunhofer IAIS, is the technical manager for the entire project. “The AI4EU project partners work towards the shared goal of overcoming the fragmentation of AI in Europe and strengthen Europe’s competitive position in the global AI landscape. The European AI on-demand platform is the key enabler to achieve these strategic objectives”, explains Dr. Köhler.